The Problem with Social Media Campaigns

I'm about to talk about corporate marketing because there's a chance that some readers will seek financial solace in the arms of big business. One of the trends in marketing has been social media, putting together campaigns that are supposed to work on such sites as Facebook or MySpace. The concept actually isn't new and we've seen all sorts of "viral" campaigns bravely rolled out by corporations hoping to surf on the zeitgeist.

Unfortunately, if you've had the sense that many of these efforts will go nowhere, some research bears out your pessimism. A Gartner researcher said that three-quarters of the Fortune 1000 are trying to use social media, and that half of these efforts will fail:

"(Businesses) will rush to the community and try to connect, but essentially they won't have a mutual purpose, and they'll fail," Sarner said. By a "mutual purpose," he means a way to serve both the company putting out the campaign and the audience interacting with it: finding that balance is not easy. The quirkiest and most addictive campaigns often provide little value for the company and turn out to be fads, whereas marketing efforts on the Web often don't go over as well with the public.

In other words, people don't go to social media for the sake of companies. They go for their own interests. If the campaign you write doesn't take that into account, then it won't work. The campaign also must have an intelligent goal. Trying to "get people talking" isn't enough, because without action there will be no business benefit.

So you have to match the venue of the campaign, and its content, with the types of people you will find at that venue and their interests. It's really basic marketing, but easy to overlook in the rush to do trendy work. So act as a consultant, not just as a writer, and help your clients see the basic problems and be sure they are framing a campaign in a way that's likely to work. Because if it doesn't, guess who is likely to be seeing a good portion of the blame?

There Is No Safety on Writers Boards

I've probably said this before, but it bears repetition. Writers go to online boards and assume that a closed and paid membership guarantees confidentiality and privacy. I've seen writers complain about editors, troll for help with stories in ways that at times suggests they don't put much effort into their work, and admit to working practices that would scare off many desirable clients. Why? Because they think they are safe.

A recent episode on one board was a reminder that editors may be freelance and on the same venues as the writers. I've also seen multiple cases over the years of someone forwarding comments to a publication in an attempt to curry favor while indirectly attacking a competitor.

The only way to use writers' boards safely is to assume that anything you write will be available to anyone and everyone. Before you post, tell yourself that the editor is also logged in, or that some partisan is ready to relay every sentence (or chosen ones out of context) to clients or prospects. There's a lot you can get out of discussions with other writers, and there are also times that burning a bridge with a client is warranted. But most often you don't want the latter, so don't put yourself into a position where you do so unintentionally.

The PITA Tax

On her blog, Heather Boerner has an amusing and useful piece on treating pain in the rear clients as a class that needs to be taxed as part of an interview with Bob Sutton, author of The No Asshole Rule. The idea is to add up all the time you spend, including the minutes you fret over dealing with the client, and multiply that by your hourly rate. This is actually a cute variation on understanding the profitability of a client. You have to calculate not only the time for which you actually get to invoice, but that part belonging to overhead and personal time. Much of this you would ordinarily write off as part of your operational expenses (for example, you don't get paid for crafting pitches to clients). But if the time is significant, it may heavily cut down the profitability, because you're actually putting in more time than you can bill for.

I'd take my target hourly rate (How many zeros can I add?), not my bottom line "must make" number, and multiple it by all the time spent on the average for the client. Then take that total amount of money and divide by the number of billable hours. Whether you express this as an hourly figure to them or merely up your project fees doesn't matter. However, do be prepared to find a replacement client, because if the size of the new number doesn't kill him or her, there's a good chance the person will walk away. Ah, how sad.

Steady Clients: Passion or Passivity?

I had a couple of recent experiences that got me thinking about the nature of long-term clients and customer satisfaction. In one case, I had thanked a writer who had referred me to a client and got a pleasant note about the feedback being strongly positive and saying that it was likely we'd be working on the next project together. ON the other hand, I found myself on the other side of the writer/client relationship, being highly displeased with one writer, as I was editing a feature package for a magazine, and saying that I'd never work with the person again. When I talked to my editor, the real client, she said, "You know, you've inspired me. I've been putting up with that writer for a long time, but maybe I just won't use the person again."

Most people in business assume that a steady client is a good client. From some views, that is absolutely correct: you lower your cost of acquiring a new customer while increasing the customer's lifetime value, or the amount of money the entity spends with you over the span the two of you do business. In short, the more money you make over time from a customer, the more efficient your marketing becomes, the more time and resources you can invest in building the future of your business, and the greater return on your previous marketing time and money investment.

Not all steady customers are the same:

• Some like doing business with you. They will seek you out, at least for the types of work they perceive you as doing well.



• Another group does business out of convenience. They have experience with you, so you become the devil they know, rather than the one they don't. That's not to say that all clients in this category consider you a devil, but we all have our weaknesses. On the balance, they find that doing business with you is a reasonably move on their parts.



• Third comes clients that work with you out of habit or inertia. They may not particularly like your work, business model, or style, but it's not enough to drive them off immediately.



• Fourth is the captured group that does business with you because they feel that they have no other choice, but they are actively interested in finding a replacement.

As you go from top to bottom, the clients may still be steady, for now, but they are increasingly likely to find another writer as soon as is convenient. That means there are different levels of vulnerability in your business even when you think some of your income is from tried and true sources.

I know we'd all like to think that all of our clients love us, but it's simply untrue. Look back over your career with some honesty, and you'll remember companies that flushed you out, or that took some work but didn't seem overly interested in having you do anything additional. There may have been some companies that kept a relationship only to get through a project - they were captive at the time - and beat a hasty retreat at the first possible moment.

Looking at your clients this way isn't to enter the land of blame, but of assessment. It may be that you and a client were or are simply incompatible, and that further business would run counter to either of your interests. The client might have been so unrealistic that a reasonable business effort would never have sufficed, and that there would never be enough forthcoming compensation to justify the exertion. Or it could be that you need to improve something - writing, business practices, areas of knowledge, or so on.

It generally takes time to know yourself well enough to begin making these judgment calls. I remember many, many years ago screwing up royally on some work and trying to blame the other party, but in my heart I knew that I was at fault. In a case like that, all you can do is work like hell to get good at what you do. Over time, the better you are, the more business starts coming your way, and the more you are able to command in the market. If you can get better faster, more power to you. If you're behind, why not work at getting better? Over time you might be able to increase a client's enthusiasm, and the chance that it will be around tomorrow.

Reaping What You Sow

I've been having what for me is an atypical experience: working as an editor on a large special feature for a magazine to which I regularly contribute. the editor had me work with several writers, and I've been coordinating and editing a large number of short pieces. What I'm getting to see up close is just how badly a writer can destroy a business relationship and develop a terrible reputation.

It's been interesting to see how three specific writers fell into categories, and how little things colored how I perceived them. One writer was great. Copy needed some editing, but that didn't matter, as each piece was slightly longer then I had requested and had most of the information I might want. the next writer was pretty good, but not as good. The differences were subtle. For example, the second writer had a couple of delays (but communicated and kept me informed), used an odd font in the story files (I had to adjust them to make them readily readable), and took a while to include all the information I needed in the format I wanted.

And then there was the third. I was able to catch the person in one outright lie after another; learned that the writer had missed an interview with a subject without immediately following up to fix the situation; would email to say "I'll have XYZ done by tomorrow morning," only to have the deadline pass without a peep; would ignore more and more harshly worded instructions I'd send; never responded to a phone call; offering one excuse after another; and during all this, would pretend that I had never mentioned some things and keep talking about how the writing would "sing." Too bad it was all off key, trying to get away with as little effort as possible for the assignment and pay (which, by the way, was hardly bad) and keep every dollar of assignment, no matter how much that might have screwed me or the magazine up.

I bet that the writer still thinks he/she was a) actually clever, b) good, and c) reasonably decent to deal with. I talked to two editors I know who had dealt with him, and heard stories ranging from only slightly better to just as bad and even worse. When talking with a third editor who didn't know the writer in question (but who has now added the name to his "black list"), we joked about knowing all the tricks becsue we've been on one or the other end of them in the past. If you think that you have never done any of this at any time in your working life, even in youth, then you are probably fooling yourself.

However, the important question is how do you relate to the rest of the industry today?; Are you trying to shave corners? Do you do things "your way" because that's the way you like it? If there are problems developing, are you quickly on letting your client know and working out other arrangements as necessary? Even worse, do you think things are fine because you don't hear anything negative?

One editor I spoke with said, who heard how hard I had been on the person, said, "You've inspired me. I think I'm not going to use X any more." Sometimes editors keep writers around out of inertia. They don't get rid of someone and find ways to cope. But tolerance doesn't mean welcome. You should do your own self examination and see where there's room for improvement, and then work hard to make the necessary changes happen. Don't depend on inertia, because eventually something will bump into the client, and by then, rescuing the relationship may be impossible.

Learn to Say No

Every writer knows that there are times to just say no. Sometimes pay or terms of a deal are far enough from your business model and practices that you can't afford to take on a given assignment or client.

And yet there is another circumstance under which many writers would do well to reply in the negative, even if their impulse is to agree almost before the question is asked. That's when someone approaches a writer with a potential assignment out of his or her experience and the writer relies on the theory that yes is always the right answer, with a scramble after to find a way to satisfy it.

I disagree that yes is always the smart thing to say, and would argue that the approach is often business disaster waiting to happen. There are areas that need specific experience and knowledge. For example, it's difficult to write about investor relations, whether in an article or as part of an annual report without some clear understanding about the regulatory nature of the field and what can and cannot be said. You could agree to cover semiconductor manufacturing without the right type of tech background, and things could blow up without your even realizing that they have at the time.

This isn't to say that you can't shift to new areas. Sometimes a topic unfamiliar to you has analogies in what you've already covered, making a transition smooth. It could be that something new, or the treatment of it, doesn't require anything that you don't already have. You might be able to develop expertise in a different field, if you invest the time.

Clients usually know when a general background will do, and when they need someone specialized. In the latter situation, making a promise and then assuming that you'll be able to cover the ground is not just taking a chance with your time, but with your client's business and money. Such cases are con games.

A business relationship is not just about you. If you find that you don't readily grasp the essentials of the topic, then you should not be covering it, or both you and the client should go into it with eyes open - and fees that reflect the fact you're on a learning curve.

What Business Are You In?

The title of this post probably sounds like a stupid question. You're a writer, right? Then you must be in the writing business.

Absolutely not. You do write, and people pay you after you write, but they aren't really paying you because you write. If people were paid simply for the act of writing, there would be millions of professional writers out there. But anyone who's been in the business knows that there getting people to pay you for writing is difficult.

The reason is that they aren't buying writing. They're buying a someone to satisfy their needs. This came home to me on a recent assignment in which I received a somewhat vague assignment. I talked with the client, understood what the contact wanted to achieve, and I started to offer suggestions - a way to frame the approach to satisfy my client's client, a structure that might provide a way of meeting the layout parameters of the publication while conveying the necessary content, and a new approach when the client made an assumption (which I had specifically asked about) that turned out not to be valid. With each step, I helped the experienced contact relax and gain more confidence that I would deliver something that would work - because we collaboratively solved the problems, and the execution would then be mechanical and predictable.

I understood that "writing" was either only part of what I do, or that the definition of writing is far broader than you often hear. I was solving a business problem. That's not to say that the writing process is unimportant to me. On the contrary, I'm always looking to expand my repertoire, strengthen my descriptive capabilities, and deepen my grasp of structure. But by itself, that is not enough. I need to apply these capabilities toward what my clients need. Otherwise I might as well be writing something literary. There's nothing wrong with that, of course (and I do write plays, fiction, and poetry), but if I want clients to deliver sizeable paychecks, I need to deliver what clients values: the satisfaction of their needs.

Blogs and What's In It For Me?

I saw a writer on a board ask about blogs and focus on the question, "What's in it for me?" It seems logical enough: you only have so much time for your marketing, and you have to decide what to pursue. But I think the logic quickly breaks down, because the question is wrong.

There is a fundamental flaw when you look at marketing and keep asking what the benefit to you is. Marketing doesn't provide a dollars and cents bottom line that you can bank. In marketing, you reach out to people that you can help and offer them products and services that they would want. The activity should be focused on the customer, not on the provider. The profit you make is a byproduct of how well you serve the needs of your customers. If you do that well, you can make money. But if you want every conversation to be about you and your needs, it gets a lot harder. It's tiresome to talk to someone who is that narcissistic.

In a blog, you can't count on getting sales or anything else. You might as well say that you write books only to promote yourself and to make more money in other activities. While a book might become part of a platform, if you've written a single one you know that that must be more to it than that.

For example, blogging about finding a topic you care for, writing about it, coming across other people who are also interested and want to hear what you have to say - and who want to say something back. It's building relationships with people in the context of the one topic.

If that turns into business, fine. If not ... well, then it doesn't. Blogging can make sense as marketing if you think that real marketing is building relationships. If that is your focus - if you want to find people and reach out to them because you have something to offer - then a blog can be marvelous, though it takes time to establish. You have the perfect opportunity to become your own publisher, to avoid large media as intermediary, and to find your own audience.

Distillation of the Writer-Editor Relationship

Something light for today - a bit of sketch comedy on YouTube that may sound frighteningly accurate.

Controlling Those Client Expectations

A writer I know recently mentioned being up int he middle of the night, sending an email, and getting a reply shortly after, and then wondering if the act telegraphed a willingness to be an indentured servant.

It's a good concern to have. Most clients make assumptions, largely unconscious and unreasoned, based on your activities. The assumptions become expectations: "Oh, Cathy is up at that hour anyway, so I should have the edits by the time I walk into the office in the morning." When Cathy actually decides to sleep that night, for a change, the client doesn't see the file when he expected it, and so gets cranky. Now Cathy has a problem to smooth over, probably without knowing that it exists. In other words, Cathy won't be dealing with the unhappy client, who might decide to go elsewhere next time, even though his unhappiness is the product of his own self-generated expectations, and not from any promise that a writer has made.

In general, it's better to let the client wait at least for a little bit. When someone wants you to do something, deliberately schedule it and negotiate a different time or day, at least early on in the relationship, so you aren't taken for granted. When people give you initial deadlines, they generally have added some padding in to help their own planning. Don't push everything to the last minute, but make sure that clients understand you are busy, in demand, and can't automatically drop everything for them.

You can telegraph this attitude in a number of ways. I know one writer who never immediately answers an email, even when possible. Instead, everything sits for at least a few hours in the inbox, even if it's possible to send an immediate answer. Another writer uses the capabilities of her email system to write responses whenever and then to configure the email not to transmit until after a specific time in the morning. When someone calls, you could explain that you are busy and schedule a time later in the day to continue a conversation.

Sure, if you know the client and there's an emergency, jump right on something as a favor. But there's an old saying: When you want something done, ask a busy person. So make sure you appear appropriately busy so that clients appreciate what a break they get when you devote some of your time to them.

When Things Go Wrong, Negotiate

Yesterday I mentioned that when things are going well, you should continue marketing with a focus on things you might not ordinarily do. When things go wrong, yes, you market, but you might also consider negotiation. Instead of taking whatever life deals out, see how much you can change more toward your advantage. I had a real example happen yesterday when a publication decided literally at the last minute because of a mix-up on its end that it needed substantial changes to a story. It was pulling the article from the current issue and now the piece was no longer accepted. I did start gnashing my teeth and began writing an email to the editor because I couldn't afford to disrupt my cash flow further than a couple of previous setbacks had already done.

I started the email a few times - got a line or two in and tossed it. Remembering my goal - to get money - I knew that venting at the editor would do no good. So I carefully crafted a message saying that we needed to talk and that while I understood there was a mix-up on the publisher's side because I got the go-ahead from someone new who hadn't known of the history of covering a given topic, I couldn't add another invoicing cycle on top of what I had already waited.

That was the first part of my negotiation strategy - because I wanted a practical resolution, not the emotional satisfaction of screaming at someone. Next, I said that if we could work out payment issues, I'd be happy to do a few extra interviews and the rewrite "to reflect what is now a different angle and article." I was clearly indicating that additional pay over the original fee might otherwise be in question. Could I have held out for more? Sure, but I was considering the most important goal in this case - while realizing that it would largely be a case of reslanting much of what I already had in a somewhat different way.

Later that day I received a counter-proposal - a one-third "kill" fee immediately, and the remainder on rewriting the article. Because I had overbooked revenue above my target goal, I could agree to that, maintain a relationship that I expect to be a profitable one (I already had a second assignment and had negotiated a 20% rate increase between the two), and still have the cash flow for the full goal, with the extra to follow in the future. So I agreed.

Did I get everything I wanted? Of course not! But did I get what I needed then? Absolutely. And if that hadn't done it, I would have looked at other possible negotiation strategies. Negotiating out of a problem won't always work - it didn't do a thing when early this year I had a client declare bankruptcy. But it's a potential tool that might get you out of a jam, so don't assume that you only use negotiation before you start an assignment. Any time an issue comes up - payment, or maybe a sudden change in an assignment or deadline - negotiation is useful. And it's a great deal more effective than tying yourself up in knots or posting on a writers' board how angry you are with someone.

Keeping Quiet About Your Problems

Gawker has had a couple of pieces recently that have been making the rounds on the writers boards. One is about a New Yorker writer looking for donations to pay for rescuing his digital images from a crashed hard drive. The other concerns a writer who allegedly used a pseudonym to keep touting the glories of his own writing to Gawker.

It amazes me the types of habits and predilections a writer will advertise in public. The New Yorker popular music critic has this request for up to $5,000 in donations posted on his home page - and he wasn't going to send individual thanks to the donors, though he's willing to post an "honor roll" of those who got his data life together. How the hell does he think people in the industry, including his bosses, are going to see this? Here's a clue: corporations often do things like running background and credit checks to make sure employees or job applicants aren't going to be tempted to steal or sell off inside company information.

As for promoting via a fake email address, don't writers read news stories about authors getting outed for posting anonymous reviews on their own books? Do such people really not realize that they're not as clever as they think? That many people don't know how to uncover subterfuges unless the perpetrator is unusually skilled in technology?

But before you scoff as these displays, consider what you might be doing without realizing it. Have you ever posted on a writers' board asking whether you could get away with something that might be seen as in an ethical grey area? Ever asked about something that you wouldn't want an editor or client to know? Depending on the discretion of strangers is unwise, and you never know when that editorial client might also have access to the same board.

There's nothing wrong with being ignorant of one thing or another. (If there were, we'd all be in constant trouble.) There's nothing wrong with asking for help or in asking "dumb" questions. And there's no value in pretending to be more than you are, because the truth generally works its way out.

However, there is such a thing as being too forthcoming. You hopefully wouldn't go around telling everyone in sight about your problems in relationships, money, and self-control. Why ever would you do the same for professional weaknesses? Develop relationships with colleagues you can respect, learn which ones you can trust, and ask what you need to ask so you can learn to improve. But don't take out the online equivalent of full page ads showing you dressed in fool's motley. It's a way of building and promoting a questionable reputation ... which isn't smart business.